Truth Unites - How Secularism Borrows From Christianity (with Glen Scrivener)

Episode Date: February 18, 2023

Glen Scrivener is an ordained Anglican who writes, speaks, and makes media to equip the church and reach beyond it.    Check out his book, The Air We Breathe: https://www.amazon.com/Air-We-Breathe-Kindness-Christian/dp/1784987492/truthunites-20  Check out the ministry he serves, Speak Life: https://speaklife.org.uk/  Speak Life on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/speaklifemedia Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

Hey everyone, welcome to Truth Unites. Truth Unites is a place for theology and apologetics done in an ironic way. And today I'm talking with Glenn Scrivener about his fascinating book, The Air We Breathe. There's a link to this in the video description. You can also learn more about Glenn in the video description. So check out the wonderful work he's doing in his YouTube channel. And I think this book is absolutely fascinating in offering a little bit of a different approach than is sometimes given to apologetics. Maybe, Glenn, you want to take just a moment and just give us the basic argument of the book. Oh, sure. Well, thanks for having me on the channel, Gavin. Yeah, the basic argument is I kind of wrote this book for a friend of mine called, I'll call her Sally. It's not her real name, but she once wrote a letter that said, I hope you realize, Glenn, I could never be a believer. And it was just so striking to me, and she said it so forcefully. She gave the impression of, you know, here is a person who is constitutionally unable to believe. It's like she lacks the genetic code that's,

that would make her a believer. And, um, and I just got to thinking that actually she lives her life by all sorts of morals and assumptions and intuitions. And she actually lives her life by these unprovable values in ways that put me to shame. She, you know, spent a year in Africa, helping with an orphanage, she gives to charity, she's a pillar of the community, she's actually a nice person, which like, that's, that's, that's, that's million miles away from me. And so she puts me to shame in terms of the, the Christian-ish values that she lives by, but she also doesn't think of herself as a believer. And, and really my, my book is written for her to say, if you believe in things like equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom,

if you believe in the inviolable worth of humans and you believe in human rights, you are believing in things that cannot be proved logically. They cannot be demonstrated mathematically. And yet, you orient your life according to these things. And so the first step I want to take people on is the step of saying, oh, I guess I am a believer after all. And then I want to press into what those values actually are. and figure out where they came from. Oh, they came uniquely and specifically from the Jesus

Revolution, aka Christianity. And then once you realize that, what are you going to do about it? And I sort of hopefully give people some steps that they can take to investigate more about this Jesus. But first of all, I want to show them that they're a believer, and that the beliefs that they have have been formed in fundamental ways by Jesus already. Let me throw an objection at you, and I think this objection misunderstand. your argument, but I hear it a lot. And so I'll just give you the chance to help bring some clarity to someone who might have this feeling. Initially, they might feel a bit defensive and say, you know, basically, I don't need Christianity to believe in equality, compassion, and progress. I can just believe in those things on my own because I believe they're right. How would you respond if someone is thinking like this? Well, my friend Sally believes in equality, compassion, and progress, and puts those things into effect far better than I do in all sorts of ways. But at some point, you've got to ask, what is the grounds for that belief in equality?

What's the grounds for that belief in progress, the grounds for that belief in compassion? And so when you think about these values, the grounds that are offered to us by secular humanism, actually do not substantially offer support for the values that we prize. And so when I mention things like equality, compassion, consent, people are just thinking, oh, that's secular humanism. And I want to pull those two words apart because I want to say, okay, they're definitely humanistic. They definitely prize the human and give an incredible dignity to people and to the weak and the marginalized. So they're beautifully humanistic, but are they secular?

Are they grounded in a view of the world that is explicitly non-religious, non-spiritual? And I would say, no, they're not, because if you believe, for instance, in equality, that's a lovely humanistic value. You believe that all people are equal, they have an equal moral dignity and worth, no matter a person's race or religion or class or money or anything. that's a beautiful humanist value. But the secular view of the person is that you're a biological survival machine, clinging to an insignificant rock, hurtling through a meaningless universe towards

eternal extinction, and we're all equal. And you're like, okay, you can believe in equality, but can you believe in equality and that secular story? Or at that point, what I really want to do is kind of ease people's cognitive dissonance. Because I think the secular humanist has two stories going on in their brains. And most of the time they want to live out the humanistic values. And a lot of the time they can do better than the Christian does. But what I don't think they can do is ground those values in a foundational kind of truth

and an account of reality that makes sense of those things. And so I want to say secular humanist, pick one. That's the beginning is of my response anyway. Yeah, yeah. I think it's so helpful the way you're not saying that, in fact, secular people don't value these things, but you're pointing to what is the ground for that? And that's really helpful. I mean, maybe what we could do is just work through some of these specific examples you give in the book. If I understand, there's seven examples.

I read this book about, oh, boy, when did we email? I don't know, six or eight months ago or so loved it and reread it again last night or leaf through it a good amount last night. And I just find it so fascinating and helpful because it's like, I think, you know, reflective of the title, the air we breathe, we just take so many things for granted when you really think about it. It's actually somewhat depressing and dark to consider a world without these values. And so it's so helpful to press upon this and ask, well, where did these things come from? So starting with equality, for example, you talk, maybe you could describe the influence that Christianity, has had for our perception of equality, and the part that struck me so much in this chapter was your discussion of Plato's views. So maybe you could tell what did Plato believe about

equality? He thought that nature teaches inequality. And it's actually, if you step outside the Christian paradigm, it's actually hard to argue with Plato, because he just says, look, here are two people. This person is smarter than that person. This person is stronger than that person. This person is a master, this person is a slave. This person is a citizen. This person is a barbarian. This person is a man. This person is a woman.

And Plato said, like, nature teaches you inequality. The Christian thing comes along and says, oh, no, but those two are equal. And Plato is like, well, equal how? I just told you he is smarter than him, right? And like, he is faster than him, and he is more economically productive than him. in what magical world, in what in what realm does this like this this pixie dust quality called equality kind of exists because what nature teaches you, always and everywhere is the difference between people. And if I take any two people and judge them by anyone metric, I will notice what's different between those two people. And even if I notice, oh, well, they both have a kind of a human general.

genetic code, there's no moral, there's no moral aught that is carried alongside that physical facts that we share the same genetic code to some degree. And so what Plato taught, as all Western philosophy, is footnotes to Plato, as they say, two and a half thousand years ago, he thought nature teaches that some people rule and some people are born to be ruled over. They should be living tools, or another word for that is slaves. And so it's not even as though Plato was sort of defending slavery. He didn't think he had to defend it against anyone who was attacking the institution because people weren't. It was just woven into the warp and wolf of reality.

There's a vitiginously steep hierarchy of being with the gods at the top and the slaves at the bottom. And wisdom consists in knowing your place in the hierarchy. And justice is enforcing natural intelligence. inequality. It is of course natural that the better should have more than the worse. And so justice is enforcing the inequalities that you see around you, enforcing them. And as soon as I say that, everybody is reacting against that. Everybody's sort of twitching. What is that twitch? That's your Christianity twitching right there. You're like, what? No, we want to equalize people. Why why equalize them? Do you really believe that there's something supernatural? If nature is

unequal, do you believe that there's something supernatural that requires us to equalize what nature has clearly intended to be unequal? And so that doesn't trace out the story of how we got to equality, but I think it does trace out the story of how different ancient people were and how different pre-Christian societies consider this topic of equality. And the short story of how we But here, I guess page one of the Bible, you've got male and female together in the image of God. Kings and queens of all creation are told to have dominion over the world. And it's just this radically different vision. All the ancient Near Eastern texts of the day would speak of the gods having all sorts of fights and creation is like the body of a dead monster or maybe it's the place of exile for naughty deities.

and humanity is created to slave for the gods. And then you come to Genesis chapter one, and humanity are created as king and queen of all creation and given special dominion over the world. It's an incredibly humanistic text, as well as an incredibly theistic text. The scriptures, it has an incredible dignity for humans. You come through into the New Testament,

Jesus is the image of God. who goes to the very bottom of the hierarchy, he dies the death of a slave, and rises up again in order to invite the world to a table where we are all brothers and sisters, and nobody is a lord except Jesus himself. And that experience of church gave us the idea of this kind of equality that down through the centuries

has kind of eaked itself out into secular and political life, and we now take it as axiomatically true that we are equal and ought to be equal, and everywhere we see inequality, justice means correcting the inequality in nature. But all of those are very Christian impulses. You know, just a parenthetical question here. As we're talking about this, the effect that it's having upon me emotionally, similar to when I read it, is to make me grateful for Christianity and grateful for the dignity that it affords human beings and grateful for the beauty, the sort of enchanting

nature of the story as you just described Christ going down to the bottom, you know. Did you have moments in writing the book where you were affected in that way? Very much so. And often it was a surprising sense of like you would read somebody like a first century, second century critic of Christianity called Celsius, railing against how horrible Christianity was because it was a religion for slaves, women, and children. And saying that the chief error of Jews and Christians, the chief error of Jews is that, you know, on page one of the Bible, they think that God specially honors humans when, you know, there's no sense in which we are better than bees or ants. we just are.

And what he found disgusting about Christianity is what warms the cockles of our hearts. And then he said, and if the Jews think that God specially honors humans, what about these Christians, disgusting Christians who believe that God actually becomes a man? It's so blinking anthropocentric. It's so man-scentric, thought-seltz, that God would deign to kind of become man. And very often, I had the experience a number of times of looking at some of the key critics of Christianity. And they opposed Christianity for the right reasons. They saw it genuinely for what it is.

And they hated it for it. But there's something about the photo negative of Celsius saying, oh, it's just a religion for slaves, women and children. And just going, oh, praise God. There is a movement that is for slaves, women, and children, because historically that has not been the case. So, yeah. It's wonderful. Let's talk about compassion. This is another value that you discuss in the book.

Page 62, I'll quote, you say, around the world and down through history, the vast majority of cultures have considered that we are all better off without the weak. One of those shocking moments when you stop and you think about it, you think, wow, that's really true. How did Christianity, could you share the narrative, how did Christianity inculcate the value of compassion throughout Western civilization? Yeah, I mean, it's a shocking statement, but you know, you think about cultures that practice infanticide. And it's just kind of a human universal, really. The first ever manual of midwifery as you want to deliver children, you know, chapter one, of this Roman manual of midwifery in the first century BC that like chapter one is on the offspring on how to discern the offspring worth raising right how to discern the offspring who are

worth raising and you know and you have like the roman historian tacitus who actually remarks upon he did he did find there was this germanic tribe that did not practice infanticide that that is the killing of children and usually the disabled and and and disproportionately girls, he found one tribe that did not practice infanticide. And it was so noteworthy. It was remarkable. He had to write it down. Are you kidding me? They don't kill their kids. That's crazy. And it has been this. And when you think of natural selection, that is the survival of the fittest. And the flip side of that is therefore the sacrifice of the weakest. And it's, if nature is all there is, it is very hard to answer the question,

why shouldn't we winnow the human population and get rid of the weak to help us to ascend? But what you get in the gospel is the very reverse. It's not the survival of the fittest and the sacrifice of the weakest. It's Christ the fittest who is sacrificed for we the weakest. so that we the weakest might not just survive, but thrive and pass on his compassion to the world. And, you know, Jesus really did inaugurate this compassion revolution. It was all there in the Old Testament and Israel believed in equality and compassion and all these things. But that had been sort of shut up in the nation of Israel. And what happens with Christ and the early church is it kind of bursts the banks of ethnic Israel to start to flood the world.

and you start to get this compassion revolution where Christians would tour the rubbish dumps where ordinarily children would be abandoned and exposed. And they would collect them and they would start to raise them and love them and they would go into the gladiatorial games and they would say stop and they would agitate for change and they ended up banning the gladiatorial games. And they started this compassion revolution

that saw hospitals as a thing that's for the poor and the weak. And this compassion revolution, this love ethic just really gripped us to the point where now we take it for granted. Now we take it for granted that of course there are hospitals for the weak and the sick. Of course there are. Of course we educate boys and girls and sort of raise them up. And of course we show compassion in all these sorts of ways. But there was no such, of course, in pre-Christian cultures that really has been taught us through the Jesus Revolution. Amazing.

Let me mention another one that's especially poignant, and that is consent. Quoting from page 86 of your book, you say, the very things that strike us. Actually, let me start this quote back up. You referenced Tom Holland, who's also done some fascinating work from a historical nature in this area. And he says, in the ancient, he's describing the ancient Roman outlook, I believe. And he says, sex was nothing, if not, an exercise of power. in Rome, men no more hesitated to use slaves and prostitutes to relieve themselves of their sexual needs than they did to use the side of the road as a toilet. Now, this, I mean, that's provocative.

I apologize for reading that. I allowed for someone who that strikes their ears, but it sort of needs to be jarring for us to appreciate the point, I think. And then you comment on this and say, the very things that strike us as abusive, the power plays, the inequality, the objectification, the clinical use of bodies and persons were, in fact, presumed in the sexual morality of the day. Do you want to unpack this point at all for us? Yeah, and I think it's important to say with all these values, but perhaps with this value, it's most pressing to say that sometimes the church has been the worst perpetrator against these values, and sometimes Christians have exemplified these values in photo-negative. And sometimes the church has shown us how transcendent these values are by violating them in the most extraordinary and grotesque ways.

And when you speak of church and abuse and the fact that those two words go together so easily in the cultural conversation, that is for our shame. And what I don't want to do is to say that Christians are better. better than others when it comes to consent or compassion or equality or any of these values. Sometimes the church has been the worst and sometimes the cover-ups have been as diabolical as the abuse itself. But for abuse to be abuse, then I guess there needs to be a standard above it that judges it as abusive. And I kind of quote C.S. Lewis in the book about the crooked line and the straight line. when you see a crooked line, you are implicitly saying that there's such a thing as a straight line, because you're judging it to be crooked.

Crooked compared to what? If there was no such thing as straight lines, there'd be no such thing as crooked lines either. If literally there was no such thing as a straight line, then lines would just be lines. Nothing would be crooked. Stuff just happens. But when we think about something like the Me Too movement, and when we think about the evil of abuse, We want to say that is evil with a capital E. But if it's evil with a capital E, there must be something good with a capital G.

If there is crooked, then there is straight. So what is the straight line by which we judge the evil of abuse? And I guess the straight line has to be the opposite of what happens in abuse. In abuse, there is this horrendous power play where the one in authority uses whatever authority they have, not to serve those without authority, but to exploit them. you have to have a doctrine that bodies are much more like temples than they are like playgrounds. You know, when sex goes wrong, it doesn't just feel like you cut your knee in the playground. It feels like holy space has been violated.

It feels like a desecration. And that's testifying to the fact that bodies are more like temples. When we treat sexual abuse as this very different category to us, other kinds of coercive behavior, we are treating sex as something that's really very, very significant. And you add these things together about the significance of sex and our bodies are more like temples and power should be used to serve. And who is it who taught us these things? And again, it has been the Jesus' revolution. Not that Christians have been wonderful at living up to the Jesus' revolution. Sometimes we've been the worst perpetrators. But the revolution itself, and Jesus himself, is good. He's good

with a capital G and his sexual revolution of the first century absolutely overturned that Roman world in which, you know, brothels were state-sponsored in which, you know, and to visit a brothel would cost you about the price of a loaf of bread. They were, they were so woven into the fabric of ancient culture that there were 25 Latin words for prostitute. Okay. And, and, and, And there's an entire industry in where do you get the girls from and the boys? Where do you get them from? You know what? You pick them up from the rubbish dumps where they've been exposed as children.

Or you go to war to capture slaves and you traffic the women and there's this incredibly exploitative kind of culture. And that's the photo negative into which Jesus comes and he says, you know what? Men and women are equal. because there had been a double standard in sex where women were expected to be virgins and there was literally no way in Latin to refer to an adult male virgin this is like you can't say that in Latin because the expectation is if you're talking about a virgin you're talking about a woman

the double standard was just everywhere and Jesus comes and says no no we're going to equalize the sexes men must be as restricted as women have always been. And that's sexual revolution and sex is going to be restricted into this union of man and woman. And a man is going to be tied to his woman and to his children in this monogamous bond that is lifelong. And that preaches the beautiful romance of heaven and earth of Christ and the church. That is a beautiful thing when you lay it against the, the sexual culture into which Jesus spoke that. And that sexual revolution has built the world

that we live in. When we think of the sexual revolution, we probably think of the 1960s. But I urge people in the book to kind of go back 19 centuries before that and figure out that Jesus is good news when it comes to sex and bodies. It's not always the message that people are used to, but I think the surprising nature of it catches people off God. It's so helpful the way we're clarifying this to make it clear that we're not saying that Christians always live out these values well and to be completely fair to own those sins. Now another objection maybe we can address here, someone might misunderstand the argument to say, okay, so are you saying that there were no consensual relationships before Christianity? Are you saying that nobody had compassion before the Christian gospel came along? If someone's thinking along these lines, how would you help them think about this?

Yeah, all sorts of compassion that happens inside the church and outside the church on this side of the cross of Jesus and on the other side of the cross of Jesus, on this side of the world or on the other side of the world. But the standards by which we're judging these things were invisible. Tom Holland's kind of quote spoke of when it comes to consent, there's all sorts of exploitation that happens that would not even be named as exploitation if you didn't have the Christian framework that was over it. So Harvey Weinstein, in today's day and age, is a moral monster, put him back in the Roman Empire. What do you call him? You call him a senator. It's just

business as usual. And so that's on the negative side of things. Is there, is there compassion and goodness in the non-Christian world? There's a whole bunch of it. There's a whole bunch of it. But the prising of something like compassion or equality and the raising of it to the central place that it has within Christianity, that is unique to Christian civilization. It's not that there's no such thing as equality in other worldviews,

but the raising of these values to these very central things, I think is unique to the Jesus movement. Yeah, yeah. That's really helpful. Okay, let's talk about enlightenment. Here's the next one. Typically, people might think of Christianity and the Enlightenment as sort of opposing forces.

You're telling a little bit of a different story about enlightenment. Can you unpack this point for us? Yeah. I mean, the general story you hear about the Enlightenment is that there was long ages of darkness, the dark ages. I mean, historians don't refer to the Middle

ages as the dark ages anymore. Because how can you call an age that includes Chaucer and parliaments and cathedrals and the invention of human rights and the secular sphere and, you know, how can you call all of that dark? But in the popular mythology, there were long ages of darkness and then Emmanuel Kant said let there be enlightenment. And there was enlightenment. And there was enlightenment and all of a sudden coming from nowhere sort of creation from nothing we've got this this sort of movement that just sort of erupted for some reason in the 17th century and following and suddenly enlightenment sort of comes from nowhere which i always like tease tease my sort of secular friends that this is a kind of a creationist account right that from nothing all of a sudden

with no precedence up comes christianity in this sort of eureka moment of let there be enlightenment and there was enlightenment. And I always say, I have a more evolutionary view of history. It would be very surprising if erupting out of nothing and for no reason there was this sort of enlightenment moment. Wouldn't it be more in keeping with everything we know about historical movements that it found its origins in a long, slow development? And it did find its origins in a long, slow development today. And I would have. say not only a development but a deviation from the jesus revolution and so provocatively i call my chapter about the medieval periods enlightenment um because i think there was a heck of a lot of light in

those years from you know around about 400 to around about 1400 i think i think that thousand year um that that that that thousand years was was a time of incredible development in the sort of natural philosophy that ended up being science and incredible development in moral and political philosophy that ended up being the separation of church and states. And all these other sort of developments that we tend to think of as revolutionary once we get past 1500, I don't think they're revolutionary at all. I think they're evolutionary. And I think all the best history of the period kind of explains this. And none of the best history kind of has this creationist view of the Enlightenment beginning once we got rid of nasty old

medieval church. I think within scholarship, it's just, it's just a commonplace to recognize that we are the heirs of this medieval Christendom that has developed and out we've come out the other side. But that chapter, I think, involved the most amount of myth busting that I had to do in terms of telling the story. Because, of course, as soon as you say medieval times, you're thinking of battles and boils and bubonic plague, right? Instantly, you're thinking that and instantly you're thinking crusades and instantly you're thinking the Spanish Inquisition and you might even throw in Galileo

if you go further into the scientific revolution. So I deal with all that. But that chapter was the biggest learning curve that I had to go on because I've thrown medieval history under the bus many, many times in conversations. Oh yeah, that's just the medieval period. Finally, Martin Luther came along

and he fixed all that for us, which interestingly is as a bit of a creationist account again. But yeah, it was, that was my favorite chapter, actually, to research and write, and the chapter over which I had to change my mind the most. Fascinating. Well, related to that is the point about science, and this is an area where I think you just mentioned Galileo, but sometimes there are these episodes that loom large and popular imagination that reinforce a narrative where there's more antithesis between Christianity and science. Maybe you could unpack this point a little bit.

How do you see Christianity as furthering science? I think the natural philosophy that was undertaken in universities and other great invention of the medieval period was studying nature, according to paradigms that were consciously breaking themselves loose from aristotle, materially in categories and sort of the old Hellenistic, the old Greek ways of seeing the world. And all of that is sort of all the developments that sort of Copernicus made and Kepler and Newton and others, all those developments are unintelligible without that thousand years of the medieval period. And lots of philosophers of science recognized that we became scientific.

because we believed not only in a God of order, but also that humans have a very special place within this world of order. The image of God has been absolutely central to so many of these values, so central to equality, so central to compassion. It becomes very central in the story of freedom and the abolition of the slave trade, but also with the scientific method, because you've got to believe that, you know, this three pounds of gray matter that exists between my two ears has any chance of plumbing the depths of the cosmos, right? How am I able to fathom the mysteries of the cosmos with a brain,

if my brain has purely been the result of time, chance, and the evolutionary process? And yet, science did not come out of that belief. Science came out of the belief that, that man and woman have dominion over the world and are in the image of God, and so that we can sort of triangulate the laws up above and our minds in here and a world out there that can be empirically observed and calibrated with the laws up above, and we can go into this triangulation, and we can constantly improve and refine our hypotheses. You've got to believe certain things about the nature of reality, about yourself, and about your senses and the trustworthiness of your senses and the need for testing.

You have to believe certain things about how sinful our minds are, which again is something that the Greek mind wasn't really attuned to. The Greek way of thinking is that your mind was the least fallen aspect of human nature, the least errant aspect of human nature. Whereas with the reformers especially and the battles between Protestant and Catholic, they were really wrestling over the nature of human beings and our sinfulness and the nature of the fall and how deep the fall goes and everyone's having to think very hard about what self-justifying fools we are. But as soon as you recognize that humans are made in God's image but self-justifying fools,

well, we need each other and we need to have a scientific method that has peer review built into it. And I need to always be trying to disconfirm my hypotheses and all these sorts of things. So the scientific method, as we have inherited it, has been shaped by all these very Christian doctrines. The success of the scientific revolution has meant that. We feel like we can jettison all the Christian assumptions and just celebrate the fact that we've got iPhones in our pockets. But doing some good history, I think, shows where these things have come from and the sorts of beliefs that you sort of need to have in order to do science in the first place. Fascinating. Well, okay, let's talk about the next one, but this is freedom. And we've touched upon this just briefly a little bit already, but I'll set it up in this way. In this chapter, and your book, by the way, for people watching this to understand, it's very readable. I want them to understand this is not going to be a book that's really difficult to access. It's filled with interesting anecdotes, and it spells things out very clearly. It's not hard to get into, so it's a well-written book. But in this chapter on freedom, you talk about the Declaration of Independence, and there's that little phrase, we hold these truths to be self-evident,

and then it talks about certain values like equality and freedom, and you're saying, well, are these things really self-evident? And the portion of this chapter that I found especially helpful was the treatment of the issue of slavery, because this is something I've really agonized my way through and thinking through myself, is how do we respond to this objection? And it's a fair objection that we have passages in the scripture about slavery. And there's, unfortunately, there's not, I will say from some of my theological heroes like St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and others, there's not as much opposition to slavery as one might hope for. I was a bit dismayed getting into church history on this with some figures. But as you point out, not with others. So perhaps you could unpack your thoughts in relation to the value of freedom in relation to this concern. How do you respond to the person who says, is Christianity pro-slash? slavery. It's been the great anti-slavery movement in history. It simply has been. And as Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury said, you know, if we waited for enlightened rationalists and the slave trade, we'd still be waiting. Abolitionism was a Christian movement from first to

last. And it was fired by ardent believers, Quakers and evangelicals and others who preached Genesis chapter 1, who preached the image of God and who preached Galatians chapter 3 and there's now no longer slave nor free in Christ Jesus in in ways that have utterly reshaped everybody's moral imagination. And in a sense, the issue with slavery and the fact that we now find it impossible to think ourselves into the shoes of a slaver. We now found it impossible to understand how anyone could put up a statue of someone who ever believed in slavery or held slaves. You mentioned the Declaration of Independence. Well, well, chief author was Thomas Jefferson and he owned 600 slaves. And we find it so incredible that he could write. Our creator has

endowed us with these inalienable rights, and he holds 600 slaves, and he's having an affair with one of them, and she's a teenage girl, and he's a, you know, 50-year-old man, and the, the way that the Jesus Revolution has utterly shaped everybody's moral imagination is such that we find it literally impossible to go back and think ourselves into an 18th century, you know, shoes or 16th century or 14th century. So is Christianity pro-slavery? There is a Hebrew practice in the Old Testament that is radically different from the Greco-Roman worlds where the Apostle Paul basically has a very quietistic attitude to things.

he within the church there are no lords except Christ and slaves could be deacons who order the life

of their slave master who in the church is receiving orders from the deacon within the church there is emancipation the year of Jubilee is kind of proclaimed in Luke chapter 4 as soon as Jesus

comes. There's a spiritual reality that emancipation that happens within the life of the church, it takes a very long time for that to be worked out into cultural and political life. Slavery did melt away within medieval Christendom. There's another thing that happened in the Dark Ages. Slavery absolutely melted away in Western Europe

and Northern Europe. In medieval period, theologians and historians can debate why that was. But they will all point to the fact that, well, Christian theology says, well, everyone in the household is baptized, and we are therefore made brothers and sisters in Christ. And that had a massive impact. But then the opening up of the new world,

and suddenly this new technology enables people to get rich, quick, and technology outstripped Christian virtue, horrendously, horrifically, and then you get the transatlantic slave trade, which is something very different to the Greco-Roman slave trade, something very different to the Hebrew practice. It's this race-based chattels slavery, and for 350 years, it was just a grotesque evil, and far more evil than anything we'd seen in history in so many ways. And so once again, Christians do not come out well from the telling of this story. Christians have been as crooked as anyone, but again, you have to figure out, well, what is the straight line by which we are judging the crooked line to be crooked?

And I talk about certain features of the gospel that the abolitionists were really pressing into. And now we live in a revolutionized society where we all consider that people are not property and you should be in charge of your own life. And in a sense, for the purpose of my book, I'm not really pressing into, what about Old Testament slavery? What about the New Testament? For the purpose of my book, what I'm pressing into is what is the nature of the moral certainty that we feel around the subject? I think that's good. And I think the foundations for that moral certainty are given to you by Jesus. And so I'm not so much trying to give an apology for how the Bible is, consider these things.

You know, the Bible is the textbook for abolitionism. It's also been used as justification by slavers. But the abolitionists won that arguments for good reasons, and I want to press into those reasons. And I want to say that those reasons are the reasons that give you the firmest foundation for equality and freedom. So keep pulling at the thread of that moral certainty that you feel about freedom. And I think at the other end of that, you'll find Jesus. That's really helpful. And I think if people will take a look at your book, they'll get the fuller case there

and find it even more helpful. But a couple of things to follow up on that, you said that I think are especially helpful. One is you pointed out that there's different forms of slavery. And for example, when we come to the scripture, Because I want to help someone who might be really hung up and they might be feeling like, yeah, but there's these verses in the Bible where it talks about it is giving instruction for slaves to obey their masters and so forth. One of the things that you pointed out just there is that we have to appreciate, first of all, not that this solves everything, but it's an entry point to recognize there are different kinds of slavery. When we hear the word slavery, we're thinking of race-based chattel slavery because that's our own context here in our part of the world. world. And, you know, I would want to say that all forms of slavery are bad. But even the word

slavery sometimes may not be the best word to have in mind for some forms. I mean, you mentioned the year of Jubilee, for example. There's economic dimensions to how servanthood or slavery is functioning in the Old Testament. Now, that's not an answer, but it's just, we just need to be accurate, you know, to understand that going into it. And another thing I want to introduce to encourage people to think about is, well, two things. One is there are some. There are some, some tremendous examples of abolitionist types throughout church history very early on. It seems to be within Christianity that you find the earliest articulations of this to my awareness.

And you mentioned Gregory of Nisa as one example of this. So I think what we want to encourage people is to think bigger, think how did these values, this is what your book is so helpful to doing. How did these values we have today come into being and we have to trace the whole, as you put it, pulling on the thread and tracing it back to figures like Gregory. And one of the comment I'd like to make and then see if you want to follow up on anything here is, when it comes to biblical commandments, when it comes to polygamy or some forms of slavery, there's this idea of accommodation. And this is the idea that God is giving rules for people who live in fallen

structures. But the rules themselves are not a wholesale endorsement of the structures themselves. So when Paul says that their servants, bond servants should obey their masters, you know, this is not necessarily Paul giving his manifesto of what is the ideal circumstance. The metaphor I've used is it's kind of like if a father is writing a letter to his son in the military telling him to obey his commanding officer, he's writing that as an accommodation to the fact that he's in the military. That doesn't tell you whether the father's overarching philosophy is pacifism or that war is. good or anything like that. I think for that you need to go to exactly where you go, Genesis 1, creation in the image of God, the gospel itself, what Christ has done for us, the epistle to Philemon, an important point on this topic. So those are some just considerations in case that's helpful for viewers, just as we're thinking about this. I'll pause and see if you want to interact

with any of that or we can go to the last point. Yeah, well, one other thing is the fact that we imagine a first century person sort of picking up this teaching from Christ about Jubilee and then becoming an abolitionist just goes to show that we have been so shaped by the Jesus Revolution because that's just unthinkable for a person 20 centuries ago to even think in those terms of overturning government, overturning in that sort of peaceful way. And that that sense of of abolishing the slave trade when the, this is a human universal. You know, slavery was just so woven into the warp and wolf of humanity that there are no societies that get above a certain level of development that do not have slavery.

And I would just ask people to just consider why is, why is our intuition, and I think it's a good intuition, I think it's right, why is our intuition that any example of slavery is the outrageous thing when actually the outrageous thing historically is that anyone overturned it. It's been outrageously good and we praise God for it. But the fact that we

sort of say, Gregory Nissa, he preached against it, but why wasn't he lobbying Caesar for this kind of political change? And that's just not the way the world worked. It's never been the way the world worked until Jesus came. And the sort of Jesus,

The sort of revolution that Jesus brings, he says, is like yeast working through dough. And we might think that that's too slow. Well, it's the way it's happened. And it's the way Jesus set it out. He said it's like a mustard seed that grows into the biggest plant. And again, that's slow growth. And we wish it would not take centuries for these things to grow. But God is patient.

And he has a patience that can be infuriating to us in many ways. Yeah, that's all I'll say on that. Yeah, yeah. Let's just finish with the last point, progress. How has Christianity influenced the way we think about the nature of progress? This is probably the most contested of the values, and lots of people might think to themselves, I don't particularly believe in progress.

I guess we all believe in progress to some degree. You know, would you like to visit a 13th century dentist? Probably not. There's been progress in that kind of sense. People are very wary of saying there's moral progress, and I agree with that. I don't think humans are fundamentally different stuff to what we were like in the 13th century, or the first century, or the 13th century BC, or whatever. I don't think humans have changed in terms of their moral fiber, but there has been this sense that the new creation is centered on a garden city. We began in a garden. We've gone through this fall. Christ has redeemed us, and we're

headed to a place that is a garden city. The tree of life will be there, the river will be there, but it's also a city. And there's a sense of progress, right? There's a sense of things improving. Jesus comes, he dies, he rises again, and he still bears the wounds of his suffering love, but he's been raised up to this resurrection body. And there is a sense of direction. There's a sense of onwards and upwards within the Christian story, which is not the case in so many cultures around the world. The way that the Greeks kind of thought of things is that there have been multiple ages, and we have descended from a golden age in the past down to a bronze age, and we might cycle back and do the whole unraveling again, but the idea that things

are going to get better is by no means a human universal. And it's been taught to us by Jesus. And so my book, the reason why I've taken the topics in the order that I've taken them is I kind of go from Genesis with equality and compassion. I go to New Testament and consent. I go to the early church and enlightenment. I go to medieval period and science. I go to the scientific revolution and then freedom. I go to the abolition and the slave trade. And then progress. I kind of, I talk about these modern movements of progress. And I guess somebody like Martin Luther King is taking some of the developments that we saw with the abolition of the slave trade and saying, we must go further with this.

And the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, was preaching scripture and preaching this prophetic hope that righteousness would roll like a ever-ending stream, right? And then swords will be beaten into plowshares and we'd all sit under our own fig tree and tomorrow will be better than today, even though we'll have to go through great struggle and suffering to get there. And so I kind of want to reclaim progress from pure progressivism. And I want to say, if you have an intuition that tomorrow can be better than today and that the evils of yesterday should be reformed today, if you want to pull at that thread, I don't think there's anything inevitable about historical processes

that gets you to that kind of progressivism. But with Jesus, you've got the hope of resurrection and you've got the hope of a history that is heading somewhere. And so, again, pull at that thread, and I hope you'll find Jesus on the other end of it. That's awesome. Yeah, well, your book is the best kind of apologetics in that it is, I think, compelling for those who are considering the claims of Christianity,

but also for those of us who are followers of Jesus, it's nourishing for the heart and makes us grateful for what Christ has done for us. And it's amazing. So thanks so much, Glenn, for the conversation. Maybe a final thing is just tell us about your YouTube channel. What kind of work do you do there? What should people know about that? Sure. Well, I'm part of Speak Life, and we're a ministry here in the UK. We offer people a year-out program. If anyone wants to come and learn how to do persuasive apologetics, but also media making, and if you're interested in the intersection between creativity, theology, and mission, we run a year out program. You can go to speaklife.org.uk. And there you can also find our YouTube channel.

It's just SpeakLife, UK. Fantastic. Well, thanks again for the great conversation, Glenn. Thanks for watching everybody. Make sure to like the video, subscribe, and make sure to check out Glenn's book in the video description. and buy it, buy it, read it, talk about it, give it a review. I think you'll find it really helpful. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next time.